The present invention is related generally to a method and apparatus for detecting chemical changes in a solution, and in particular, to a method and apparatus for employing optical sensors to measure changes in optical interference patterns resulting from chemical changes in a solution.
The concept of using changed in the optical properties of a fibre optic sensor to detect chemical changes in solution has been described in the present art.
However, the method of detection in these cases has been to monitor the absorbance or fluorescence of a surface coating on the sensor tip.
The present invention utilizes the measurement of changes in interference patterns of layers deposited on the sensor tip. The main advantages of this method include increased sensitivity compared with absorbance and fluorescence changes; increased robustness and universality, i.e., the same sensing platform can be used to cover a very wide range of analytes.